Re: Pterodactly gripe / oGnus wish

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com>]

sperber@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de writes:
> I look at the *Groups* buffer.  It displays the correct number of
> (ticked) articles in a group.  I enter the group and it prompts me
> with a totally bogus number of articles to fetch.  Why can't Gnus
> count at least as well as I can?

Because at the point of construction of the *Group* buffer, Gnus does
not know what is inside individual groups.  Gnus knows what the active
file says about the group, which is nothing more than a high and low
value for article numbers.

Gnus does not discover the gap until it enters the group.  When you
tell it to do so, all it sees is that "low" subtracted from "high" is
a number of potential articles which is larger than the
gnus-large-newsgroup variable.  So it bugs you with a question.

Considering that the entire structure of Gnus is built on this
distinction between knowing the set of groups available (in *Group*)
and learning what is in a given group (as *Summary* is being built),
it will be extraordinarily difficult to "fix" this.  Consider that it
absolutely _cannot_ be fixed for nntp or nnspool groups, because Gnus
cannot affect that numbering at all -- long-held FAQ articles with
expiry times of months or more just plain hang around, unchanging.

> The fix described in the FAQ is a major kludge.  Why do people have
> to be aware of the article numbers used internally by Gnus?  If the
> FAQ answer has any sort of official status, why isn't there a
> GNUS-GROUP-CLEANUP function bound to a convenient key that does the
> job?

That, at least, is a good idea.  It would be a relatively simple
matter to bind some function so that, after one has entered a group
which is "too large" (pointlessly, I agree), one moves all the
articles to the same group, and thereby the excessive apparent size is
eliminated.

I suppose it's even possible to produce a hook to consider doing this
automatically, perhaps on group exit:
        if this is a mail group and
           group was "large" on entry and
           actual article count is in single digits
        then
           ask user whether to auto-cleanup group
        fi

--karl